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After working at Acumen this past summer, I was left with questions about talent in the social impact sector (or purpose-driven talent) and how companies can connect social impact to talent development.

Being of Chinese decent, but never having the opportunity to travel back to my “homeland,” I was really looking forward to my first visit to China. As part of Global Network Week 2013, I traveled with four of my Yale SOM classmates, along with twelve other business school students from EGADE (Mexico), IE (Spain), and Technion (Israel), to Fudan University in Shanghai to learn more about doing business in China firsthand.

SOM Spring Formal - Derby Theme!
There are only so many days left before you start orientation, and before you know it we’ll be on campus strutting around like we own the place. That is, until we all move into a new building, and then it’s just like 1st Year all over again. Until then, we wanted to provide you with some things you could do now to prepare yourself for the unrelenting whirlwind that is the SOM MBA experience. Using some of our finest brains, we’ve come up with these words of wisdom, (in random, stream-of-consciousness order) ...

Photo courtesy of Matt Levine. Sarah, Matt, Marvin, Nate, and Michael posing at Bullet Canyon
Now that I have had a bit of breathing room between finals and starting my internship at Acumen, I finally can share some insights on Yale’s inaugural trip to the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) as part of Yale’s Leadership Development Program (LDP)...

Greetings from Bali! Now that I have been able to have a little bit of rest and relaxation in Bali after my Global Social Enterprise (GSE) and International Experience (IE) trips, I can actually reflect and share some of my experiences in Indonesia. One of the unique aspects of my trip to Indonesia was its focus on international development and natural resources, led by professor of developmental economics, Mushfiq Mobarak.

Greetings from Managua (or somewhere between Miami and LA en route to my Indonesia International Experience to be exact)! I just wanted to share some of my thoughts after my Global Social Enterprise trip to Nicaragua, where I was able to reconnect with my international development roots and social entrepreneurship passions firsthand!

Balancing it all – the acrobatics of business school are quite delicate. I often equate Yale SOM to a start-up business of sorts. Similar to a start-up, Yale SOM provides boundless opportunities to make great impact. Given SOM’s relatively newer legacy with its ivy peers, SOM has few institutional barriers that lend itself to flexibility and change at all levels from administration to academics to extracurricular activities.

SOM prides itself on its integrated curriculum, which also bleeds over to clubs and other activities around Yale. After starting our Fall-2 core classes, our first foray into the SOM’s integrated curriculum, I have been incredibly impressed by how concepts have blended together, to the extent that it is almost hard to tell which class is which given the overlap in cases and coursework - all presented from differing perspectives (customer, competitor, investor, CFO, etc.). This overlap also overflows to SOM’s clubs and extracurricular activities.

“Eminent and Purposeful Yale”
After only a couple months being in New Haven, I have been amazed by the wealth of resources that comes from being at an institution like Yale. Yale SOM is trying to fully integrate itself with the broader Yale University, leveraging the full breadth and depth of resources at Yale. One of Dean Snyder’s goals is to collaborate and utilize connections between SOM and Yale’s other leading programs including Law, Forestry and Environmental Science, Medical, Divinity, Global Affairs, and of course Yale College.